News that hackers released intimate photos of celebrities online brings into focus how vulnerable all of us may be to cyberstealing. It can sometimes feel like the wild west on the Internet. So is there anything we can do to protect ourselves?

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The FBI is investigating how very intimate photos of actresses including Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton got onto sites like 4Chan and Reddit.

For now the attention is focused on enormous online servers like iCloud, which store and back up email, photos and other data. But these servers can be a one-stop shop for hackers who some analysts say launched a "brute force" attack.

"They use brute force to attempt to guess tens or hundreds of thousands of different versions of passwords. Once they have account name and password they have full access to the account," said Andrew Borg, of EC3 Consulting.

We've all used "forgot password". But for hackers it can be a perfect way into someone's accounts by providing the final combination to get inside. So how do we keep the hackers away?

"By using encryption services, using difficult-to-guess passwords and having different ones for every site," said Borg.

And when available, use a two-step authentication service like one from Google. A one-time code is texted to the user. That user's password doesn't work without the code.

"If someone wants to steal it, they have 30 seconds from the time it was sent before it expires. And then a new one can be requested or sent," said Borg.

Whatever the vulnerability, the safest approach is to minimize risk.

"It's about making the barrier to accessing your files without permission as high as possible," said Borg.

What's most important, said Borg, is to think twice about putting out anything you'd be embarrassed by later.

"They shouldn't store anything online that they don't want on a billboard on top of their house," he said.

In a statement, Apple says individual accounts were compromised, but there was not a general breach involving its iCloud and Find My iPhone services.